Women Leading the Tasting Trail

If you’re a craft beverage fan, you are likely familiar with the Central Pennsylvania Tasting Trail, a collection of fourteen Centre County craft beverage producers—wineries, breweries, distilleries, and cideries—that are part of an organized “passport” system attracting locals and tourists alike. 

To participate in the Trail, customers purchase a passport to be stamped at each location over a one-year period. Along with bragging rights and swag or samples from each business, passport holders receive an exclusive commemorative sweatshirt upon completion of the Trail. 

The Trail has grown increasingly popular in recent years, thanks in large part to women leading the way in the creation and management of the Trail itself, as well as in owner, manager, and maker roles within the individual establishments. 

Blazing the Trail

The Happy Valley Adventure Bureau (then known as the Central Pennsylvania Visitors Bureau) developed the concept of a local tasting trail in 2015. 

Lucy Rogers, tasting room manager at Big Spring Spirits, represented the distillery at early Trail meetings and quickly found herself in a position of leadership, serving as the organization’s president for five years. 

“I just kind of took it on because I liked the idea of being part of it. I really believed in it, thought it was a good way to get the word out that we existed, and that it was a good marketing tool,” she says.

Early on, she recognized opportunities for growth, expanding what was initially just a month-long event to a year-round program and improving incentives for passport holders. 

On top of her full-time management position at Big Spring Spirits, presiding over the Trail and running its annual Craft Beverage Expo was a lot for Rogers to juggle, and she says the same was true for the other members of the self-governing organization.

“It just became too hard for people running a business to really try and run a second business and to pay attention to the stuff that needs to get done,” she says. “You’d have the same conversations over and over at committee meetings—a lot of kicking the can down the road.”

So, in 2020, the organization decided to hire someone to manage the Trail. Enter Celesta Powell.

Powell was uniquely suited for the role, with a background in the nonprofit world and experience working with the Trail as former general manager at Happy Valley Brewing Company. 

“Having Celesta is awesome, because she has worked in nonprofits, so she knows how to write grants, and she has a lot of ideas about how to improve attendance and marketing,” Rogers says. “It’s grown so much, and Celesta is a key part of that.”

In fact, since taking over, Powell has helped grow the passport program from 350 passports sold in 2019 to nearly 800 in 2022. She is particularly proud of securing last summer’s partnership with the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts, which featured alcohol sales (exclusively from Trail members) for the first time in its 55-year history.

For her part, Powell gives a lot of credit for the Trail’s success to the women who play crucial roles at their places of business, whether that be as a manager, an owner, or a maker.

“The women are the doers. … They’re the counselor of the customer, the counselor of the staff, making sure the product is great, keeping everybody moving, and doing it all with a smile,” Powell says.

A Lifestyle Business

As tasting room manager at Big Spring Spirits, Rogers handles everything from sales and marketing to managing staff to running events, even coming up with a new business model offering delivery services and take-out ready-to-drink cocktails during the early COVID closures.

Other women in management positions along the Trail include Amy Seaton of Elk Creek Café and Lynda Nguyen, who handles sales and special events for Barrel 21, Otto’s, and Keewaydin Cider. 

The hospitality industry in general, at least in front-of-house positions, is pretty female-dominated, Rogers says. Ownership, on the other hand, is not. 

According to Forbes magazine, nationally only one in three breweries is woman-owned, while in Napa Valley, California, only fourteen percent of wineries have a woman at the helm. It is harder to find statistics for cideries and distilleries, but just about everyone agrees—for owners and makers, the craft beverage world is a male-dominated space.

Yet, Powell says, almost half of the businesses on the Central PA Tasting Trail are owned or co-owned by women, due in part to the fact that they are mostly small family businesses.

Linda Weaver is the owner and general manager of Mount Nittany Vineyard and Winery, which she purchased in 2014 from her parents, Joe and Betty Carroll. Her husband, Steve, is the vineyard manager, while Linda, a former banker, oversees sales, purchasing, hiring, and front-of-house responsibilities. 

“It’s kind of a lifestyle business. It would be a tough thing to do without the full support of your spouse,” Weaver says.

Barb Christ and her husband, Elwyn Stewart, opened Happy Valley Vineyard and Winery together after retiring as professors of plant pathology at Penn State.

Like Weaver, Christ mainly handles administrative and front-of-house duties, while Stewart manages the ten-acre vineyard and makes the wine. But, she says, “I’m kind of a jack-of-all-trades. I help out in the vineyard; I’m kind of the crew boss when it comes to harvest. If I have to help in terms of being on the bottling line or helping with pumps, I’m there.” 

Christ served as president of the Pennsylvania Winery Association in 2020, and she says she has been heartened by what she has seen as far as the role women are playing in the sector.

“In Pennsylvania, the industry actually has a fair amount of women, in roles beyond just sales. A number of women are actually the winemakers. So it’s there,” she says.

Christ and Stewart are currently training two of their grandsons in the art and science of winemaking, with one grandson expressing interest in taking over the business when the couple retires. 

This all-in-the-family kind of arrangement is common among the Trail’s wineries, Powell says. Pisano Winery in Millheim is owned by Andy and Patricia Pisano; Seven Mountains is owned by Scott and Mary Ann Bubb. University Winery is owned by Jeff Proch, but his mother and father, Natalie and Jinx, play key roles in the running of the business.

Axemann Brewery is owned by another wife-husband team, Dorothea and Rod Stahl. 

Rod manages the brewing, while Dorothea manages social media, stocks the Gear Shop, pays bills, sends invoices, coordinates charity events, and handles other administrative necessities. She believes it is the couple’s complementing strengths and personalities that have helped the brewery to flourish as much as it has managed to do.

“When Rod brought up that he wanted to try to start a brewery, I said, ‘I don’t think this will fail. You are detail oriented in making really great beer, while I’m oriented in making a great experience,’” Stahl says.

While Rod brought to the table his technical expertise as an engineer and a longtime lover of home brewing, Dorothea brought her many community connections, including from having served eight years on the State College Area School Board.

“I am a social person. That part of me is an asset. My background and my involvement in the community really helps when you need the community to show up for you,” she says.

The community did indeed show up for the Stahls as they opened during the middle of a raging pandemic in 2020, quickly buying up the first 100 cases of Blue Stripe Beer ever stocked at W.R. Hickey Beer Distributor in response to a social media post from Dorothea.

“It really warmed my heart,” she says. She notes that other women playing key roles at Axemann include Rachel Gobin, assistant brewer, and Cristina Roth, marketing director.

Makers of the trail

Axemann Brewery’s neighbor is Titan Hollow, home of Mad McIntosh Cidery and Alloy Kitchen. Along with her silent partners, Angela Eliasz is an owner and also the head cider maker.

After a long career in the visual effects industry in Hollywood, (“I tend to gravitate toward male-dominated careers, I guess”), Eliasz moved back east after wrapping up her work on Men in Black 3. 

An interest in winemaking led to her becoming a cider maker (“Cider is really just an apple wine,” she explains) for Empire Cider in New York. Eventually, she decided to strike out on her own, and she felt that the factory space available in Titan Energy Park in Bellefonte would be perfect for her vision.

“It’s so masculine and industrial with the concrete and metals and rust, but we approached the atmosphere with a very feminine touch. We filled it with antiques and velvets and beautiful fabrics. It’s been fun to reinterpret the space from a female point of view,” she says.

Eliasz believes that female point of view is part of what makes women good craft beverage makers.

“I think we bring a sensitivity to it that men don’t necessarily always hone in on or bring to the forefront. Research suggests that women have better palates, or more sensitivity to things that are better for wine and cider making.”

Centre County’s only female head distiller, Erica Unruh of Barrel 21, echoes this belief.

“The process of creating spirits requires creativity, attention to detail, problem-solving, patience, along with a refined palate, which makes the industry a great fit for women,” she says.

Unruh came to Barrel 21 after earning a certificate from Moonshine University in Kentucky and teaching herself the ropes through trial and error while she worked at her uncle’s distillery in Wyoming. She recently participated as a contestant in an episode of Discovery’s Moonshiners: Master Distiller competition show, which will be airing soon, she says. She was recruited by the show in part because they wanted more female distillers to be represented.

“It can be an advantage to be a woman in such a male-dominated industry because people want to support women and seek out ways to support women in these spaces,” Unruh says. “But we often have to work harder to be given the same amount of respect and recognition as our male counterparts. Our skills, abilities, and knowledge are often questioned more, and we typically need to prove ourselves in ways that males do not.”  

Eliasz is surrounded by a largely female staff, including manager Ann Bliss and Lori Sabatino, the owner of Alloy Kitchen. She feels this only makes the business stronger.

“Being female-owned and operated, we looked to see how we could make a business where our values as women were brought more to the forefront,” she says. “It can be done with respect for what our main goals in life are—family, friends, happiness, security, and not just the bottom line of a spreadsheet. I think that’s what women bring to the table. It’s a different way of doing business.” T&G

Karen Walker is a freelance writer in State College.